HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use Zerto for backups and DR; we back up to a StoreOnce unit and then offsite. We have over 11 servers, including three Oracle servers, one Oracle database, and an Active Directory. 

Before Zerto, we used another solution that caused database crashes and did not offer certainty regarding disaster recovery. Zerto is more configurable and stable.

A DR site reduces downtime, especially with full VM backup and online synchronization. Zerto accomplishes this without affecting network efficiency, as synchronization occurs at specific intervals.

Zerto's ease of use is outstanding; it's easy to set up and has a clear interface and menus. The reporting, analytics, and online monitoring are also excellent.  

Compared to other solutions, the speed of recovery with Zerto is faster. Our last backup solution, Data Protector, was very slow, but Zerto is rapid even in file retrieval. 

The solution helped reduce our organization's DR testing; it's hard to say precisely how much, but Zerto does faster DR testing than other products.

Improvements in stability would be welcome; there are some software bugs that can affect RPOs. We want more of a guarantee that we won't lose any of our backups, even in the event of a disaster. 

The platform measures the right speed of storage devices and gives an alert on the VPG if there is latency, but the nature of the alert suggests the solution isn't meeting the SLA. However, this shouldn't affect the health status of the backup. It should provide an express report that we should enhance our hardware rather than express latency as a threat to the backup capability.

We've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is acceptable, we experienced an issue once, but the backup time is speedy.

The solution's architecture supports business owners to expand their disaster recovery capabilities as their infrastructure grows. Additionally, Zerto's ability to integrate with various cloud platforms and on-premises environments further enhances its scalability, offering a flexible and robust solution for organizations with evolving needs.

Customer support is one of Zerto's best aspects; the support is excellent, and we can quickly get through to them. I rate them ten out of ten. The support staff are very kind and always solve a problem. I feel secure knowing I have access to such good support.

We previously used Micro Focus Data Protector and Veeam Backup & Replication. Zerto is easier to use and more straightforward to configure. 

Zerto replaced our legacy backup solution, Data Protector. This not only saved on the cost of the old product but also provided more stability and security to our company. We now have a new backup methodology, and it's a significant upgrade.  

I carried out the initial setup with support from Zerto, which was very straightforward.

The only requirement for maintenance is monitoring the solution and updating versions.

I have 20 years of experience in IT, so I was well-positioned to carry out the deployment myself, with the assistance of Zerto support.

We have seen an ROI with Zerto. 

The pricing is slightly above average, but the immediate and comprehensive support makes the price acceptable.

We evaluated many other options but found Zerto the best, especially for our HPE environment. It's the most stable and straightforward tool, and even those with limited experience can operate it.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I strongly recommend Zerto; I've tried many other solutions, but it's the most stable.

We use the product to help protect VMs in our environment, and regarding RPOs, I carry out the test for them every six months, and it's working correctly.

I advise those evaluating the solution to use it, especially in an HPE environment, as it's fully compatible and easy to manage. There is no requirement for special drivers or configurations.

I am a system engineer and IT architect. We use Zerto to protect our production -environment and critical applications. Everything is on-prem. We don't do any DR to the cloud. We're protecting around 300 VMs right now.

I've been fortunate enough not to need to rely on Zerto in an actual disaster, but we do testing every year. Sometimes, it's multiple times annually or at the year's end. It takes the recovery workflow, which would normally take a lot of planning, and reduces that to just a few minutes. 

The most valuable feature is the low RTO that covers our VMs and a secondary data center.

I would like Zerto to add support for VMware's lifecycle manager. 

I have used Zerto for about eight years.

I rate Zerto eight out of 10 for scalability. We have one instance per data center that supports everything that we need, and we haven't had to scale past that.

It's been several years since we've looked at other products. We used VMware SRM in the past, but Zerto is way faster. Zerto is easier to use than other solutions we've tried. 

Zerto is easy to set up. Once you've deployed the appliance and connected it to a  vCenter, your VMs are protected pretty quickly.

Zerto costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we haven't needed to use it in a real DR situation, so it's hard to quantify an ROI. However, based on what we know from testing, it will be a huge benefit in the worst-case scenario. 

Zerto's pricing is pretty competitive. They recently went through a licensing change where you have to buy an enterprise license as an organization. We weren't happy with that just because it forced us to pay for extra features we don't use. We would prefer if we could still have that standard license.

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.

We are primarily using it for migration and data protection. We use it for protection of the VM and data protection. 

It's the easiest way to support DR as it does the conversion for you. After converting, it protects again. If you don't want Azure, you can just go back on-premises, for example. 

We can monitor VMs more easily with Zerto. We can always check if they aren't properly syncing. The migrations are also easy. 

The overall impact on our RPOs has been amazing. The ease of using it is great. Everyone is embracing it in our company.

The ease of use is ten out of ten. It's the easiest to use. 

The speed of recovery is great, especially the failover/failback. It helps our company a lot. 

The most valuable feature is the GUI. It's very simple. 

Setting it up is very easy. 

Everything is automated using scripts. 

The solution saves a lot of time and there is no downtime based on how the product is designed. If there's any downtime, it's only a second or two if we move. 

The near-synchronous replication is great. It just works. I'm a big fan of Zerto.

Right now, the solution is perfect. They shouldn't try to do everything. Zerto is DR and needs to focus on that. Everything works for us. There is nothing to improve. 

They already released the features that we want. We aren't missing any features. 

I've been using it for almost five years now. 

At first, when Zerto was bought by HP, we thought it was just going to be HP. However, Zerto is really working out and the stability is great. I hope they continue what they are doing and refrain from making major changes. 

Zerto scales pretty well. They have a lot of customers. The word of mouth is helping with growth.

It scales well with our environment with the conversion from VM to Azure and vice versa. It's so easy. There's no middle-man involved. It's just Zerto. 

The technical support is hit or miss. If it is a high-priority ticket, you get great Zerto support, however, if you just have a question, they redirect you to their documents. 

Positive

We previously used SRM before Zerto. 

The initial setup was not hard at all. We deployed a VM and had our team open the ports and we were all set. 

It only takes about an hour or two if you have the proper people helping you with the networking. 

We have witnessed a lot of ROI. Being technical, I always ask to make sure management is happy with the product we are trying to use. With the migration feature, it's way better now. We are able to migrate from the old data center without any disruption. That's a big win. 

The pricing is fair. The pricing is very competitive and it works well. You are paying for a product that is easy to use and just works. 

We've evaluated multiple DRs and some VMware products. Zerto was the winner due to the GUI. Also, it just works.

I have colleagues who are doing a POC with Zerto and will begin using it based on my recommendation. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. If I could give it eleven out of ten I would. 

We use it for failing over our production servers in the event of an emergency so that we have minimal downtime to continue business operations.

We only use it for failover to on-prem. We do not use it for the cloud.

Zerto was one of the first failover solutions that we implemented in the organization, so the benefits are pretty drastic. It is hard to compare it to any other solution out there because we do not have anything to baseline it on, but it certainly increases the confidence of our end users. We are able to react in the event there is an issue. The fact that we are not waiting for hours to restore operations is something that we find valuable.

We protect VMs in our environment with Zerto. We are very happy with the RPO results.

Its ease of use is most valuable. The online documentation is very clear and helpful. We are able to solve a lot of problems on our own without having to contact support.

We learned that we got a new account representative supporting our account. I found this out today. Apparently, this is something that they kicked off at the beginning of this year, but there has been a failure in communication in letting us know who is the proper channel for us to reach out to if we need assistance. 

While going from the major version 9 to 10, they introduced a new requirement for ECE Licensing, which is not something that we knew about at the time of our last renewal. We purchased it for a couple of years, and as far as we knew, we were in support. It was only when we were in the middle of the upgrade and had set up the entire environment and tried to put it up, it asked for a license key that we did not have. We were told by the support team to reach out to our account manager. She has been a bit slow to respond. It just seemed like lip service. The timing kind of worked out because there was a conference as early as that. They have been trying to fix it and communicating about it. I am hopeful it will be resolved, but I just cannot say for sure how soon or how fast they can remediate it.

I have been using Zerto for about two years.

It is stable.

We have not had any issues increasing the number of VMs being protected as long as we have licenses. We have over 100 VMs.

They are responsive, but when things need to be escalated, it is very unclear who is going to be the person to ensure that things are resolved. I would rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

I was not involved in its deployment.

It is hard to say, but the value is there. At the end of the day, the benefits of having a failover solution outweigh the cost.

I did not participate in the evaluation of other similar solutions.

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. We are interested in the technical abilities that it offers, but we would like to see an improvement on the support side.

We mostly use Zerto to replicate applications and database servers between our primary data center and our disaster recovery site. We have a number of business applications, Oracle servers, and three sites that we replicate to our DR site, and Zerto works well.

We deployed Zerto on private cloud and on-prem.

Zerto is low maintenance, so I can set it and forget it. It has a great process and an excellent solution.

We use Zerto to protect our virtual machines and virtual database servers.

Zerto has reduced the staff involved in the data recovery situation because we don't need to involve the backup team. We only require a couple of people to do a failover.

As our backup is managed by a separate team, we can use Disaster Recovery without involving the virtualization team. We do not need to involve the storage or backup teams, as Zerto takes care of all that. Therefore, only one or two people are needed for overall backup and management.

I appreciate Zerto's near synchronous replication, point-in-time restore, brick-level restore, and file-level restore features. We haven't had to use the feature in a real disaster recovery scenario yet, but we tested it thoroughly. The only manual part was changing the DNS from the production IP to the DR IP. Everything else worked perfectly. 

Zerto is user-friendly.

It would be beneficial if we could gain insight into DNS record reporting from the DR side, however, this is not a realistic expectation due to the fact that different companies use different hardware and different methods of DNS management. It would be advantageous if Zerto had plugins for Infoblox, Cisco, or load balancers, as this would enable us to better manage those records. Unfortunately, this is not a realistic expectation as these products are usually managed by the middleware or a network team, which has no relation to their application.

I have been using the solution for around three years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is certainly scalable and easy to deploy. We do not use as many licenses as they have available, but we are in the process of rolling Zerto out to all business users and applications.

Zerto's technical support is great.

Positive

We previously used SAN replication and storage replication. We also used some products from Veritas, but now we use Zerto, which is easier to set up. Zerto is great.

The initial setup is straightforward. I had no prior knowledge of Zerto when we first deployed the solution, so I had a few conversations with engineers, but other than that, it was relatively easy to learn and I was able to understand the whole process. The deployment took less than two weeks to complete.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment.

I give the solution a nine out of ten. Zerto is a great solution that does exactly what it advertises and I definitely recommend it.

Zerto requires regular updates and maintenance. However, it is mostly a "set and forget" system, which is very convenient. This allows me to focus on other tasks.

Zerto has its own use cases, so we cannot replicate an entire site, but if we have to select certain products or applications that need to be replicated, such as a DR site, then it is an excellent solution to use. However, Zerto is not suitable for everyone and it would be difficult to do it on a large scale. For specific applications, it is great. I could not replicate my whole data center with Zerto, as it would be too complex. Nevertheless, Zerto is great for certain applications.

Our primary use case for Zerto is for disaster recovery. In the last few versions, they've offered backup, but we don't use it because it's not nearly as robust as what most of our customers are looking for. We also use it for migrations too, to migrate customers into our cloud, and things like that. But that's around 20% of our use case.

Zerto has enabled our growth. Five years ago we had around 20 customers and now we have 500. We protect around 15,000 VMs now.

One of the most valuable features is the analytics portal. It's still an evolving feature and has ways to go but we use that for monitoring because we have hundreds of sites. It's nice that all the alerts and everything is consolidated into that one site because we used to have to make sure that we were connected to many, many sites to make alerting work, which was a nightmare. 

Our alerting is done through scripting too. They do have pre-canned alerting through but is not very robust and they're working on it. They actually included us in the study on it. For instance, if you were to have a problem at a certain site or something, there's no way that you could take it out of monitoring. If you were using their system, it would just flood you with alerts from all kinds of stuff from the site if it was down. It is great if a site is down and you don't expect it, but if you have planned maintenance, you don't want all of this coming in.

There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better.

We reduced the number of people involved in recovery situations by using Zerto. We had another solution before and we had a small number of customers and it took the whole team to manage 20 customers. Now we have 400 to 500 customers and our team is relatively the same size. We're broken up into different teams, but when we managed it all ourselves with only 20 customers, we had four people. And now we have around 500 customers and we have around 20 team members.

Zerto has a really robust PowerShell and scripting that you can get lots of numbers out of but it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. Zerto has a few nice pre-canned reports but there is a need for more. Unless you script something, it's difficult to go in, click a button, and see the information that you may be looking for.

The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited.

Zerto is very easy to use on the surface, especially if you're an enterprise customer, which is just like A to B replication or one site to two sites. As a cloud provider, they still have a lot of work to do. But for most customers, it would be fantastic. We have a lot of private clouds that are one site or two sites. So when it's not meshed like our larger environment is, it works fantastic. But when you get into the overall fully meshed model with vCD integration that we have, it doesn't work as well. I think Zerto is mostly concentrated on the enterprise customer and left the cloud providers by the wayside.

With the HP acquisition, product development has certainly accelerated. They recently released the first major half release and have put additional focus on cloud providers. Unfortunately, the major focus remains on Enterprise. Next year, they will force customers to move from Windows management VMs to Debian Linux. I can only hope they have a well-thought-out migration tool. My fear is that the cloud provider will be a secondary thought once again.

The major issue with Zerto development is that they refuse to patch the current software release and only patch the newest release. When you hit the bug, they expect you to upgrade right away. This is not an issue if you only have a hand full of sites. The issue when you have 100s is that there is no way to skip a minor release. Every multi-tenant customer you have must be upgraded to every minor release. Two to three upgrades every year for every customer is very intrusive and requires way more management effort than should be necessary. We often have a hand full of customers delaying the upgrade cycle and are forced to discontinue service to those customers. HP can surely develop a better model.

I have been using Zerto for six and a half years. It's deployed on-premises, on the cloud, and we use it as a SaaS offering. We are the cloud provider. We also integrate with AWS and Azure.

It's a very stable solution, for the most part. They have a new release every six months and some releases are better than others as far as bugs. Sometimes those bugs have to do with something in Hyper-V, and sometimes they have something to do with VMware or vCenter. But many times, it's directly related to Zerto's problems. Usually, their major releases go in .0 and .5. The .0 releases have the new features in them and they're more buggy and the .5 releases are more stable.

It's extremely scalable, in a small sense, but the problem is when you get very meshed, with 10 sites replicating to 10 sites, and each one of them is meshed in to be able to replicate it to the other one. Then scalability starts to become problematic.

The big thing is, we have a cloud manager that manages all our ZVMs, which enterprise customers probably wouldn't have. You can only upgrade half a release for each upgrade. So you couldn't go from Zerto 6 to Zerto 7. For instance, you have to go to 6.5 and then go to seven.

Trying to upgrade is not easy because every customer that's paired and replicating into those sites has to upgrade it in those steps. It takes us several months, twice a year, to get everybody upgraded. They have a portal called Cloud Control which makes things better as far as upgrades, but they recently broke it with version 7.5 by adding encryption. So it was useless. We just upgraded to a version in which it should be working again, so the next time we're going to try to use Cloud Control to upgrade. Hopefully, it will be better. We only really have one round of upgrades through Cloud Control to get an idea of how well it worked. 75% of the time, those upgrades work without problems.

There was a time when they had customer service people just taking tickets and they couldn't really help you at all, which was terrible. Now, they have a level-one level-two-type model. The level-one guys are getting better, but as they grow, it can be difficult. 

All of our engineers are certified and we would like to go straight to level two. A lot of times we waste a lot of time with level one, and then they put the ticket in the queue for level two. So it takes another day to get to level two unless we're really loud and escalating the ticket right away. The biggest problem that we have with Zerto is getting to level two. 90% of the time, because of our knowledge, level one is not useful to us. Although, it probably would be to the average customer. 

Zerto really needs support dedicated to CSPs and large customers.

Positive

We switched from our previous solution because Zerto was so much easier than everything else that we saw. We have a team that does the tests. It was a pretty easy choice to move away from those platforms at the time and those platforms no longer exist. Today there are many alternative DRaaS solutions and we offer many of them. Zerto remains more mature and feature-rich than the competition though.

The initial setup was pretty easy. You have to have connectivity between the sites that you're replicating, your production, and then your DR site or sites. Getting that connectivity is the biggest thing. Once that connectivity is there, it's fairly simple. You deploy Windows VM, put a small software package on it, and then pair the two. You do the same thing at the recovery site and once those sites are able to talk. In VMware, you install a VM on each ESX host that you need to replicate a VM on. Then you create a policy to do that replication. The replication policies work very well. Re-IP on failover if problematic.

The network connectivity takes the longest. It can take weeks, depending on what you have to do to connect the sites. It could be a couple of hours if you're just setting up a VPN. If you're putting in a circuit, it could take a very long time. That's the X factor with it, but assuming that's already there, within an hour you could be replicating data from one site to another.

ZCCs remain a major stumbling block. If the routing table has issues, the only fix is to delete all protection, redeploy the ZCC and rebuild. Again, avoid Zerto Cloud Manager until the product matures.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We have seen an ROI. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep using it. The biggest thing is the number of VMs we can support with the staff that we have. 

The licensing is fair. We have an enterprise license in which Zerto gives us 20,000 licenses or something well above what they think we're going to sell for the year. Then all our customers pull from that pool and we resell the licenses. We may sell 50 licenses to a customer but at the start of their contract, they may only have 30 VMs ready for DR. We contract them for 50, but eventually, they'll get up to 50. So we don't have to go to the vendor and add and remove one license here or one license there all the time.

That part of it is easy, but we do have to license all of our sites once a year, which is a pain and all of our sites report to Zerto Analytics. I've been asking them for years since they started Zerto Analytics, why we can't just put our license key on analytics rather than logging into hundreds of sites and putting them in each site. That's a real beast. They definitely need to fix the part where the site licensing is terrible. As far as the licensing VMs to replicate, that's great.  In version 9, Zerto plans on deploying a license server to address this.

Zerto 9 is out and there is still no customer-deployable license server. We regularly have issues with customers who cannot reach the Zerto license server. They cut you off at the knees after 14 days! HP really needs to work on this process.

Commvault was one of the big ones we looked at. Commvault is much more complex and expensive. We also looked at AWS and Azure. We offer a wide range of solutions. 

Recently launched last year, Nutanix LEAP is primarily designed for people that use Nutanix, and not everybody does. Not everybody can use it. We also offer RecoverPoint for VMs. It is a Dell EMC product, so it's geared toward people that are running VxRail. And then there is vCloud Availability. You have to have vCloud Director on both sides and vCenter, which is not something that everybody has either. vCloud Availability monitoring is also a nightmare. Zerto is more the product of choice for most use cases. 

Some of the biggest problems that we've had as a cloud provider are the vCD integration and the Zerto Cloud Manager integration. If you can avoid those two things, avoid them.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

We use Zerto as a DR tool. Instead of having to have a duplicate DR server, we can add a system to BPG and point it to whatever our DR site will be and replicate it for customers.

We also use it for migration planning. If we need to move VMs from on-premise to Azure or back, or it was built in the wrong place, we can easily move it over. 

It reduced the time for DR tests from the infrastructure side. Being able to get our work done in a matter of a couple of minutes so the app teams can get to work and can do their testing has been significant. 

Before we would have to use a backup recovery tool to restore it to a LAN, which could take hours at times, depending on the solution that was being used. 

The replication features are most valuable. It's fast to set up a BPG and get a system added. This aspect is very important to our business. Being able to provide customers with a very fast DR experience, whether it's for a test or live case scenario, and being able to provide the ability to move systems to Azure for cost savings or migrations, saves our ops teams a lot of time.

We would love to have a native management pack for vROps and to be able to view a dashboard and metrics for BPGs within vROps. We would like to have a single view for monitoring and provide customers with dashboards so they can see their own BPGs. 

We would also like to have a native plugin for VRA built by either VMware or Zerto. That way there's actual support for it and we're not on the hook for trying to figure out what happened if it breaks.

We have been using Zerto for four years.

The only problems we've had stability-wise come from upgrades.

This is a scalable solution. The only challenge is that there's no way to manage it centrally at the moment. If you have 30 vCenters, you now have 30 appliances and you have to remember where everything is, which can become a pain point when it comes to trying to find where this VM is being replicated and what BPG it's in. 

The support for this solution could be improved. It is challenging for staff who actually understand the product. We had issues where we ended up spending hours and sometimes days on the phone, only for us to figure it out on our own.

They're very personable and fine to work with. It seems like technical expertise is lacking. I would rate them a five out of ten.

Neutral

I haven't used too many other disaster recovery tools. We used standard backup solutions and Zerto is significantly faster. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use it primarily for DR.

What I appreciate the most about Zerto is that it is the easiest to install, upgrade, and manage. Most things in the product are fairly intuitive and easy, including upgrades. You don't have to dig through a bunch of manuals or go through a bunch of technical data to make it work.

The low RPO times of about four to eight seconds are very nice and very valuable to us.

The alerting could be fine-tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them.

It could be cheaper as well.

I've been using it for six years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any real problems or downtime. The only thing is that it runs on Windows, so that has its own problems.

Zerto's scalability is very good. We haven't had any scaling problems. We tested out DR in Azure, DR to VMware on GCP, and DR on AWS. It performed on all of those. The AWS setup was the most complicated, but AWS with Windows is a little bit messy.

We currently have 400 licenses. We have two ML350s, and we use Zerto to keep them replicated. If one fails, we just move to the other. That has been expanding, and that's where we've been adding licenses.

Zerto's technical support is very responsive. We had some posts that were not working properly and caused some issues with Zerto. The technical support staff were very helpful and worked through the night to help us resolve that. They always solved any problem I've had, so I'll give them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used SRM. It had a lot of specialized plugins and specialized machines, but was very cumbersome. We weren't guaranteed that it would work all the time. It was very complicated to set up and manage as well.

SRM was storage-vendor-dependent because you had to have plugins through the storage vendors. It wasn't IP-based at the time and relied on storage-based replication. We had disparate storage arrays and disparate systems, and the IP-based replication treasury was much more resilient on our end.

The initial setup was unbelievably easy. We had Zerto up and running in five minutes, whereas setting up the SRM replication took weeks and needed technical support staff.

We deployed it ourselves.

In terms of ROI, it was quite expensive, but I think we got a lot of value out of it, such as being able to have a reliable DR method, particularly offsite. We have very poor latency locations, and sometimes, we replicate those. Zerto makes that very easy.

From a customer perspective, the price is okay. From an investor's perspective, however, it is a little bit high.

We looked at Veeam, but Zerto was a better match for our needs.

I would advise you to give Zerto a try in your environment. Get a trial license and see how it works. I think you'll be very impressed.

Overall, I've been very happy with Zerto, and I'd give it a rating of nine on a scale from one to ten.